And I don’t just mean not bothering with updates or road maps about what’s going on, or even sticking to their words or promises. I mean why do you think they are so bad at listening ? They have an IP with so much potential, but they spend 60% percent of their time driving players away with existing and ignored issues (trapper for one) and poorly implemented unwanted changes and then take months or years to even acknowledge or fix. all the people I used to play with have been driven away, they used to buy skins, but not anymore.
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Good question. I have been wondering the same ever since I played Vermintide 2.
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Games Workshop is a notoriously difficult licensing partner to work with and Fatshark is very diligent about abiding by their rules and approval process, which partly explains why things take so long and they don’t communicate clearly ahead of time.
The rest can only be attributed to Fatshark themselves. I don’t know anything about their overall decisionmaking but I know that the problem isn’t a lack of willingness on Strawhat’s part to be transparent, lol.
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This being your first Fatshark game shows.
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it gets a lot easier if you forget the whole “live service” thing as of the crafting update im happy with the game as is, and any other updates are just happy coincidences for me
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i’m fine with their silence, as long as they are going to fix this bug
i’m sure they don’t need GW’s validation for that
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I’ve heard enough about Fatshark’s past to lay the lion’s share of the blame with them. But I’ve also seen some of GW’s shenanigans firsthand.
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You should handle all of Fatsharks titles like the old games you could buy on DVD that were a final product without any communication or updates from the publisher.
Then when there is communication or an update eventually you can have a surprised pikachu face and be happy (or not if ogryn gets nerfed again).
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No offense, Hank, but this feels like reaching.
(novel incoming…)
Owlcat created a pretty amazing WH40K CRPG in Rogue Trader, and there are many other really good (and poor) WH40K projects like Space Marine 2 (not my cup of tea, but still).
I know I have no idea more about the matter than you do, but this habit of absolving Fatshark of blame constantly because: “Oh, they are a small studio” (Arrowhead is smaller), “Oh, Swedish holidays” (I’m a Swede, as are Arrowhead, GSG and other studios), and “Oh, Games Workshop.”.
Constantly excusing Fatshark’s development process for something they have no control over simply shifts responsibility away from the company’s management to other sources, which neither I nor you know if it’s true.
What I believe is that Fatshark management isn’t fulfilling their duties correctly. The people working on the game are obviously very talented, and when they deliver, they usually deliver, but they picked a live service approach for Darktide (yes, Darktide is a GAAS game; stop lying about it) when they appear to lack the capacity to deliver.
The best example I can give to back up my position is this: when Fatshark releases a new weapon, do they also release a skin in the shop for that weapon to boost sales of the new and shiny thing as soon as the patch drops?
No, they do not do that, and while the store is not the end of the world and most likely most players do not care about it, the fact that they do not jump on sales of the newest flash tells me everything I need to know: they don’t understand how to monotize the game and hence cannot grow.
We need to hold Fatshark accountable and stop blaming Games Workshop, Tencent, or “God on this green earth” for problems at their studio. Some blame EA when its companies fail to produce quality games.
Stop it.
Accept responsibility for your own faults!
The publisher, IP owner/holder, or Omnissiah are not always the source of the problem. Sometimes you (the developer) are the problem.
All of you who know me know how much I love Darktide, but I’m getting frustrated by people trying to blame something else instead of simply admitting that Fatshark could have done something different instead of releasing a game (Alpha) that was broken out of the whazoo that us PC users had to Alpha test for a year, then “killing” the game by doing nothing while working on console ports TWICE.
Something that should have been done BEFORE release to make sure that both the PC and console versions shipped and were completed at the same time!
Don’t get me started on Havoc, and what a waste of resources that was…
And that is one of Fatshark’s major flaws: they don’t communicate, they don’t poll the playerbase like Arrowhead (for example), so they have no idea what people (the majority) want, and they waste time doing stuff that only a small percentage (myself included) wants instead of trying to grow the game.
That is why our playerbase consists of 5-6k gamers rather than 10-50k.
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This is also usually accompanied by vox-logs and ancillary ‘hype’ bits being released at the WEIRDEST times. I think it’s been 2-3 times that a vox log ‘teasing’ something has been released after the thing its teased has come out.
Fatshark’s problems are very clearly a management level issue. They miss deadlines, they screw up communication, and they never, ever, ever do the right thing on the first try. It’s always sabotaged by random nonsense and complete inability to finish things on time.
It took them the better part of a year and a half to simply. Not make the weapon system godawful. Something that anyone could’ve told them was terrible and made balancing everything harder for no reason and they sunk time, resources, and effort into it and the subsequent attempts to put lipstick on the pig when the proper course of action was to not do the stupid thing to begin with.
A company can make mistakes. But Fatshark has had years to learn the basic tenets of game design and refuses to - and such a pattern of behavior only comes from management.
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when the most recent event came, they released the trailer for it, like a week later
so yea they have an issue at managing things
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DT too was used to be around 10k players but they wasted the opportunity after the success of the crafting update (which should been a thing at day one anyway) to release more content on a monthly schedule which would been the best and would kept growing playerbase
but everytime a major content is always 3 months which is just weird, when there are many other indie companies with low budget releasing lot of major content with a good schedule.
also hotfixes having a cadence similar to major content update, which doesnt help either, and everytime you look at a hotfix, you may still slightly be disappointed, because the bugs that always been reported and begged to be fixed, they are not fixed still.
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the one managing the top end decisions need to be brought to the same motivation and overspilling energy “subtitle guy” puts on display at the trailers.
now this dude “lives” darktide and it shows
hats off to you, mr. subtitle guy
and strawhat, she’s been awesome too 
just feels “draining” to see the havoc status quo drag on without any form of
“we stick to it”
“we hear ya”
“we think of something to…”
even option one would at least let me “mind-shelf” the mode for good and ignore completely without doing build thoughts or invest energy as how to “get it done” once a week.
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Because they don’t care about the players. They have one goal to make money from the players! The project is a failure , we need to get out of there Only one thing will save the game, the dismissal of the director of Darktide
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What you just said makes zero sense!
If Fatshark aimed at gaining money (a company wants money, what a shocker), they would focus on revenue-generating items such as regimental skins, weaponskins, paintjobs, and really up the FOMO by rotating the store every third day rather than every second week and rotate sales on bundles so people would be tricked into buying more at once.
They would then utilize that money to develop the game in order to increase the player base and generate more potential sales via the MTX Store.
They are not doing that, thus they are clearly not making a lot of money with an IP that has players paying thousands of euros for little plastic figures.
Fatshark is horrible at monotizing a brand that essentially prints money for nothing.
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Their lack of communication is a trend with this company. They work retro-actively, so just add it to their to-do list.
The good news is they stuck around Vermintide with updates for 6 years, free maps and such. So, I take this poor communication with a grain of salt knowing at least they are working and will eventually get around to it, maybe.
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It really does smell like a management problem, since the beginning of DT and only seems to have gotten worse.
The irony is, and not a strictly FS thing, a mid-size shop (studio) that seems to have the glacial sluggishness of a large shop and the lack of resources of a small one; worst of both worlds.
I’ve been in at least one such company like this myself and it sucks beast of nurgle bollox(es?), it was management issues there too.
IDK what’s going on over there but man it has to be painful for many of the devs and I feel for them, I really do, but holy cow I wish someone can break in at night and fix some trivial issues then slip them into a “hotfix”.
At the very least hire some QA staff, it’s sorely lacking, and I’ll say it again, always the underfunded and unsung heroes of a SW dev shop.
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It’s bureaucracy and red tape. Everything requires fatshark to forward submissions for approval by games workshop, then after approval it gets sent back to fatshark with approval. Fatshark also has certain small things )such as some cosmetics design work) outsourced
The other part is that the dev gobos are grinding away at working on things so much for the biweekly hotfixes cycle
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indeed, it’s a trickle of updates, and when they manage to rekindle interest in the game like they did with the class rework and the crafting update, that is not followed by more content to keep the new or returning players engaged. so player numbers spike to maybe 15k but then drop again to that ca. 5k core player base.
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